YouTube Finds Step 2 1 In Profit Plan: Will Pay For User Vids – Gizmodo
YouTube rolls out profit sharing plan where they reward uploaders with shares of ad sales based on number of views. The ads will come in the shape of short clips in place of the actual YouTube video, which you presumably have to watch before getting to the meat. The videos may be at most three seconds long, but the details are still being worked out.
The day people have to watch a video ad before they watch the YouTube video is the day that YouTube is no longer relevant. Unless Google makes it not just illegal but physically impossible to create a free user-content video sharing site, this is doomed to fail. You can’t just take a service that everyone loves, make it less valuable to the audience by adding commercials, and expect people to stick around. Sure, it might help get more and better content. But that wasn’t really the problem, was it? Have you ever NOT found what you were looking for on YouTube? This strikes me as catastrophically stupid.